How does an archive begin—is it an active decision to become a keeper of collective memory?

Since the 1980’s artist and curator Margaret Tedesco has been developing an extensive archive of ephemera, zines, books, works on paper and objects, with particular interest in poetry, performance and queer phenomenology.

Upon walking into Tedesco's apartment in 1995 the late artist Ann Chamberlain simply panned the living room that contained her archive and said: “These stacks seem to be well-massaged.”

For her presentation Punctuation from the Archive, Tedesco will highlight a history of performance, as well as ephemera and objects from her collection and discuss her relationship to the archive as collaborator.

The best way to observe my archive: tripping down the rabbit hole, no focus, losing attention.

The archive plays itself.

Margaret Tedesco grew up in Los Angeles and San Francisco. She works across performance, installation, photography, sculpture, and video, and for more than twenty-five years has presented and collaborated with visual and performance artists, writers, and filmmakers. Her work has been shown at SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, White Columns, New York, and internationally. She received the Bay Area Award for Performance from New Langston Arts in 1999. In 2007 Tedesco established [ 2nd floor projects ] an artist run exhibition and publishing space in San Francisco which received the Southern Exposure Alternative Exposure Award.

West Coast Presentation
November 5, 2016 – February 26, 2017 | de Young

SAN FRANCISCO (March 31, 2016)—The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are pleased to announce Frank Stella: A Retrospective, an expansive presentation surveying the career of this towering figure in post-WWII American art. Approximately fifty works, including paintings, reliefs, sculptures and maquettes, represent Frank Stella’s prolific output from the late 1950s to the present day and reveal the artist’s dramatic influence on the cultural landscape over the last six decades.

Stella first burst into the New York art world in 1959, at the age of twenty-three, already a fully mature artist. Over the next several decades, Stella anticipated and pioneered many of the explosive changes in the art world, and remains an enduring figure of both critical and popular attention, as well as controversy. An erudite intellectual and theorist, and a committed student of history, the artist has spent his long career exploring and extending the tradition of abstraction.

Frank Stella: A Retrospective begins with the artist’s rarely seen early works before moving on to the highly acclaimed Black Paintings, introduced at the Museum of Modern Art’s Sixteen Americans exhibition of 1959–1960. Continuing with his groundbreaking Aluminum (1960) and Copper (1960–1961) series of paintings, which feature the artist’s first shaped canvases, these sections of the exhibition reveal Stella’s affinities with ideas that were further pursued by Minimalists such as Donald Judd and Carl Andre.

The presentation includes paintings that demonstrate the artist’s innovative explorations of color and structure and how they relate to abstract illusionism. The paintings he produced throughout the 1960s combine unexpected colors with radical shapes and increased scale. Highlights include examples from his Benjamin Moore, Concentric Squares, Irregular Polygon, Protractor, Polish Village and Brazilian series.

The exhibition also contains major works from the artist’s Exotic Bird (1976-1980) and Circuit (1980-1984) series. This section addresses the artist’s interest in expanding the surfaces of his paintings outward by projecting sheets of cut metal from the picture plane, and in further activating those surface gestures by drawing on them and adding various reflective materials. These paintings influenced a later generation of artists in the Neo-Expressionist and Pattern and Decoration movements of the 1980s.

The survey concludes with Stella’s large-scale Moby-Dick painted reliefs and sculptures, inspired by Herman Melville’s iconic novel, which are contrasted with more recent works from his dynamic Scarlatti K series, inspired by the sonatas of 18th-century Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti.

About the Artist

Born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1936, Frank Stella attended Phillips Academy, in nearby Andover, and Princeton University, where he studied art history and painting. After graduation, Stella established permanent residence in New York City and achieved near-immediate fame with his Black Paintings (1958–1960). Throughout his career, Stella has continued to challenge and expand the boundaries of painting and sculpture. Though his early work influenced and allied him with the emerging Minimalist movement, Stella did not regard himself as an adherent of Minimalism, and his art has become visually more complex and dynamic over the years. Evolving away from a restrained aesthetic, Stella’s compositions became increasingly ambitious and exuberant in form, color and scale.

This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

The Proposal presents a climactic moment within Jill Magid’s extended, multimedia artwork, The Barragán Archives, which examines the legacy of Mexican architect and Pritzker Prize-winner Luis Barragán (1902–1988). The multi-year project poses piercing, radical, and pragmatic questions about the forms of power, public access, and copyright that construct artistic legacy. With this work, Magid asks, “What happens to an artist’s legacy when it is owned by a corporation and subject to a country’s laws where none of his architecture exists? Who can access it? Who can’t?”

Through his will, Barragán split his archive into two parts. Along with the vast majority of his architecture, Barragán’s personal archive remains in Mexico at his home, Casa Barragán, which is now a museum and UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 1995, Barragán’s professional archive, including the rights to his name and work and all photographs taken of it, was purchased by the Chairman of the Swiss furniture company Vitra, allegedly as a gift for his fiancé, Federica Zanco; who now serves as Director of the Barragan Foundation. For the last twenty years, however, the archive has been publicly inaccessible, housed in a bunker at Vitra corporate headquarters.

The Proposal reaches a thrilling and unexpected salvo in Magid’s engagement with Barragán, Zanco, Barragán’s descendants, the Mexican Government, and the indispensable creative legacy that binds them. Through the public exhibition of The Proposal, Magid will present Zanco with the gift of a two-carat diamond engagement ring grown from the cremated remains of Barragán’s body, in exchange for the gift of his archive to Mexico.

The exhibit serves as both a poetic counterproposal to the original gift to Zanco, and a stunning re-animation of the formerly closed scenario. Magid’s gesture elegantly, and forcefully rejoins the divergent paths of Barragán’s professional and personal archives; even as it reveals Barragán’s official and private selves, and the unique interests of the institutions that have become the archives’ guardians. By developing long-term relationships with multiple individual, governmental, and corporate entities, Magid directly engages complex intersections of the psychological with the judicial, national identity and repatriation, international property rights and copyright law, authorship and ownership, the human body and the body of work. On May 31, 2016, Magid proposed to Zanco in Switzerland. The Proposal has not only exhumed Barragán’s physical remains, but opened the possibility to bring his spiritual and artistic legacy up out of the vault and back to life.

The Proposal is commissioned by San Francisco Art Institute. The exhibition is curated by Hesse McGraw, SFAI Vice President for Exhibitions and Public Programs, and organized with Katie Hood Morgan, Assistant Curator and Exhibitions Manager.

About the Artist

Through an artistic practice that is at once visual, textual, and performative, Jill Magid (*1973, lives in New York) forges intimate relationships within bureaucratic structures—flirting with, seducing, and subverting authority. Her projects probe seemingly impenetrable systems, such as the NYPD, the Dutch Secret Service, surveillance systems, and, most recently, the legacy of architect Luis Barragán, and infiltrates and unsettles these forms of power. Her work dynamically locates unexpected and rich communities within faceless bureaucracies.

Her works often take the form of elliptical love letters that draw out human qualities in agents of control. These charged encounters are founded on mutual trust, but are also fraught with ethical complications and social asymmetries. Through her works, Magid reframes the complexity, potential intimacy, and absurdity of our relationship with institutions and power.

Her performances and exhibitions have been commissioned and presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and the New Museum, New York; among other venues.

Realist. Surrealist. Hippie. Punk. Bruce Conner (1933–2008) was all of these and more. A pioneer in experimental film, collage, photography, conceptual works, and paintings, he challenged the limitations of medium, genre, and style, constantly breaking new ground. Both of and ahead of his time, Conner continues to exert influence over artists working today. Bruce Conner: It’s All True is the first comprehensive retrospective of this pivotal American artist’s incredible output, bringing together over 250 objects in various media, including film and video, works on paper, assemblages, photographs and photograms, performance, and more. Spanning his five-decade career, the exhibition presents aspects of Conner’s work that have rarely been seen before, from paintings he made in the 1950s to photos from the Bay Area punk scene in the 1970s to video work from the 2000s, as well as numerous works produced in the last decade of his life.

The system is broken. The system is rigged. Statements like these are familiar to a politically polarized American public, but rarely does political rhetoric go beyond the sound bite. The celebrity dimension of politics distracts from a detailed understanding of the economic forces that shape our lives. But Melanie Gilligan pays close attention to those forces.

Through complex installations of her low-budget films, Gilligan offers powerful reflections on life in late capitalism. Blurring the distinctions between episodic television, documentary film, gallery exhibition, and theater, she presents remarkably perceptive assessments of the political conditions of our time.

Melanie Gilligan (b. 1979, Toronto) lives and works between New York and London.

This exhibition is curated by Leila Grothe. Lead sponsorship for Melanie Gilligan: 2016 Capp Street Artist-In-Residence is generously provided by Sonya Yu and Zachary Lara.

Yuki Kimura translates abstract ideas into tangible objects. Because concept is paramount, her work borrows elements from architecture, design, photography, and sculpture in service of making the immaterial material. She often includes found photographs, but their subject matter, composition, and context are subordinate to their presence as physical objects.

The elements in this exhibition of new work are doubled and multiplied. Pairs of photographs are blown up to human scale and hung together on a wall or transformed into matching tabletops. Identical twin images reference a traditional Japanese New Year's decoration that symbolizes the idea of a mirror, as well as a western philosophical concept of time in which past and present are intertwined.

Yuki Kimura (b. 1971, Kyoto, Japan) lives and works in Berlin.

This exhibition is co-curated by Jeanne Gerrity and Leila Grothe. Lead sponsorship for Yuki Kimura: Inhuman Transformation of New Year's Decoration, Obsolete Conception or 2 is generously provided by Sonya Yu and Zachary Lara. Additional support provided by John MacMahon; The Japan Foundation, Los Angeles; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo; Jägermeister; and Sidney Frank Importing Co., Inc.

Tom Sachs and his team of astronauts set their sights on the next frontier of space exploration in SPACE PROGRAM: EUROPA.
Targeting Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, this expansive sculpture exhibition offers an unprecedented view into Sachs’ extraordinary artistic output and advances his quest to find extraterrestrial life with bricolaged sculptures. The exhibition will fill YBCA with everything his astronauts need to successfully complete their voyage—including the Mobile Quarantine Facility, Mission Control, the Apollo-era Landing Exploration Module (LEM), and special equipment for conducting scientific experiments—immersing the audience in a universe of sculpture occupying the entire downstairs galleries in addition to YBCA’s public spaces.

Space Program: Europa will feature live activations of the Europa flight plan by Sachs’ astronauts during the opening and closing weekends. In these demonstrations, the astronauts will showcase the rituals and procedures of their mission, including the cultural export of chanoyu, the ancient art of the tea ceremony. Get tickets to the opening weekend demonstration now!

Sachs has also created new site-specific installation, Logjam Café, specifically for this exhibition. Logjam Café will be open to the public as a neighborhood coffee shop, occasional bar, and OCD rehab center, where visitors can experience firsthand the artist’s obsession with the tools of his craft.

Welcome to FOG Design+Art 2017. Named after the iconic and ethereal phenomenon for which San Francisco is renowned, FOG Design+Art is a platform for contemporary design and art that shifts, morphs, and reveals itself through multiple forms and dimensions.

FOG Design+Art is once again collaborating with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). The museum is currently undergoing a major expansion that is scheduled to open in spring 2016. Proceeds from the FOG Preview Gala and fair support SFMOMA's California-wide exhibitions and education programs, which provide meaningful art experiences to more than 60,000 students, teachers, and families each year.

Untitled, Art is an international, curated art fair founded in 2012 that focuses on curatorial balance and integrity across all disciplines of contemporary art. Untitled, Art innovates the standard fair model by selecting a curatorial team to identify, and curate a selection of galleries, artist-run exhibition spaces, and non-profit institutions and organizations, in dialogue with an architecturally designed venue. Since 2014 the curatorial team has consisted of Artistic Director Omar López-Chahoud with curators Christophe Boutin and Melanie Scarciglia. Untitled, San Francisco will be located at the historic Pier 70 in the Dogpatch neighborhood, and will take place January 13, 14, 15, 2017.